After small scale testing of a production server as a VM, the decision was made to go ahead and virtualize some of our systems over a period of a few months.

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Due to a very limited budget, commercial solutions like Scale's HC3 were not an option, so we had to come up with a way of doing things with the lowest expense possible with as much benefit to DR as possible.

We accomplished this by buying a single IBM X3650 M4 with a single 10 core Xeon processor, 64GB RAM, and 16x1TB HDD. This fell within our budget, and would allow us to expand the system during the next budget year by adding another 10 core Xeon and 64GB RAM.

We also re-purposed an older x3650 M2 that had dual quad core Xeons and 32GB RAM to act as a replication server in a secure, technically offsite (a building still on our land, but far away from any of the main production buildings) location. We added an extra 32GB RAM to bring the available resources as close as possible to the Primary server.

We deployed Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 to both machines, and started building VMs to house some of our systems. We felt that building fresh VMs rather than converting existing systems, was a better option, and so one by one we gradually moved things over to VMs.

Once we had the primary server as close to capacity as we were comfortable with, it was time to start learning about Hyper-V Replication and figure out how the replication worked, and what would need done in the event of a failure to bring systems back online. This part turned out to be the easiest of the whole process, and so now we have things replicating well, and a recovery time of around 5 minutes from server failure.